An End-to-End Entity Linking Approach for Tweets
Ikuya Yamada1 2 3
ikuya@ousia.jp

Hideaki Takeda3
takeda@nii.ac.jp

Yoshiyasu Takefuji2
takefuji@sfc.keio.ac.jp

Studio Ousia Inc., 4489-105-221 Endo, Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan
2
Keio University, 5322 Endo, Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan
3
National Institute of Informatics, 2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan
1ABSTRACTWe present a novel approach for detecting, classifying, andlinking entities from Twitter posts (tweets). The task ischallenging because of the noisy, short, and informal natureof tweets. Consequently, the proposed approach introduces
several methods that robustly facilitate successful realization of the task with enhanced performance in several measures.

Keywords
Entity linking; Wikification; Twitter; DBpedia; Wikipedia

1.

INTRODUCTION

Microblogging services, such as Twitter, are rapidly becoming virtually ubiquitous. This is attributable to the factthat they are extremely valuable mechanisms that enable
us to obtain live and raw information in real time. In thispaper, we describe our approach to the #Microposts 2015
NEEL challenge [6], a competition for extracting and typing entity mentions appearing in tweets, and linking thosementions to the corresponding URIs of the DBpedia 2014
dataset1 , with non-existent mentions also being recognized
as NIL mentions.
The main difficulty inherent in this task stems from thenoisy, short, and informal nature of tweets. The performance of previous approaches su↵ered because they tended
to focus on well-written, long texts such as news articles.
Our system explicitly focuses on tweets and addresses theproblem using a variety of methods working together.
Our proposed system addresses the task in an end-to-end
manner. Unlike most of the previous approaches, the systemdoes not use an external named entity recognition system(NER) to generate candidates of the entity mentions because the current NER typically performs badly for tweets[5]. Our system first generates the candidates by using approximate candidate generation that can detect misspelled
and abbreviated mentions and acronyms. Then it uses supervised machine-learning to remove irrelevant candidates
and resolve them into the corresponding DBpedia URIs.
1

http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Downloads2014

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Consequently, we constructed three supervised machinelearning models to detect NIL entity mentions and predict
the types (e.g., PERSON and LOCATION ) of the detectedmentions.

2.

THE PROPOSED SYSTEM

Our proposed system addresses the task using a procedure comprising the following five steps: 1) preprocessing,2) mention candidate generation, 3) mention detection anddisambiguation, 4) NIL mention detection, and 5) type prediction.

2.1

Preprocessing

We tokenize a tweet and assign part-of-speech tags to theresulting tokens using ARK Twitter Part-of-Speech Tagger[2] with our enhanced hashtag tokenization method. We also
extract the timestamp of the tweet from the Tweet ID.

2.2

Mention Candidate Generation

In this step, the candidates of the entity mentions are generated from the tweet using the methods described below.

Mention-Entity Dictionary.

The system uses a mention-entity dictionary that mapsmention surface (e.g., apple) to the possible referent entities (e.g., Apple Inc., Apple (food)). The possible mention
surfaces of an entity are extracted from the corresponding
Wikipedia page title, the page titles of the Wikipedia pages
that redirect to the page of the entity, and anchor texts in
Wikipedia articles that point to the page of the entity. We
constructed this dictionary using the January 2015 dump ofWikipedia.

Candidate Generation Methods.

The system generates candidates using the mention-entity
dictionary; it first takes all the n-grams (n < 10) from thetweet and performs queries to the dictionary using the text
surface of each of these n-grams. The following four methods
are used to retrieve candidates:• Exact search retrieves mention candidates that havetext surfaces exactly equal to the query text.
• Fuzzy match searches the mention candidates that havetext surfaces within a certain distance of the query text
measured by edit distance.
• Approximate token search obtains mention candidates
whose text surfaces have a significant ratio of words incommon with the query text.
• Acronym search retrieves mention candidates with possible acronyms2 that include the query text.
2We generate acronyms by tokenizing the mention surface
and simply taking the first characters of the resulting tokens.

· #Microposts2015 · 5th Workshop on Making Sense of Microposts · @WWW2015

The system first generates possible mention candidates
using the above methods, sorts these candidates according
to the number of occurrences in which the mention appear asa link to the referent entity, and selects the top k candidates(k = 100 for exact search and k = 30 for other methods).
Additionally, we experimentally set the maximum allowed
edit distance of fuzzy match to two and the minimum ratioof approximate token search to 66% because these settingsachieve the best scores in our experiments.

2.3

Mention Detection and Disambiguation

In this step, we first assign a score to mention candidates
using a supervised machine-learning model. In this case, weused random forest as the machine-learning algorithm.

Features.

We started out using features similar to those proposed inprevious works [1, 3], and subsequently introduced several
novel features to enhance performance. The features introduced include 1) contextual information using word embeddings to measure the contextual similarity between a tweet
and an entity, 2) temporal popularity knowledge of an entity extracted from Wikipedia page view data, and 3) string
similarity measures to measure the similarity between thetitle of the entity and the mention (e.g., edit distance).

Overlap Resolution.

Finally, the overlapped entity mentions are resolved. We
start with the beginning of the tweet and iterate over the
candidate entity mentions. Then, we detect the mention if
the corresponding span of the mention has not already been
detected and the score assigned to the mention is above thethreshold. If multiple mentions are found, the mention withthe highest score is selected.

2.4

NIL Mention Detection

We formulate the task of detecting NIL mentions from atweet as a supervised classification task to assign a binary
label to each of all possible n-grams (n < 10). Random
forest is again used as our machine-learning algorithm.

Features.

We extract several features from the output of the Stanford NER3 using two types of models: 1) a standard threeclass model, and 2) a model that does not use capitalization
as a feature. We also use the ratio of capitalized words as anindicator of the reliability of the capitalization in the tweet.
Additionally, various other features are used, such as partof-speech tags of the surrounding words and the length of
the n-grams.

2.5Type Prediction

We cast the task of detecting types of mentions as a multiclass supervised classification task. In the previous steps, weextracted two types of mentions: entity mentions and NILmentions. Thus, we are able to build two separate classifiers to predict the entity types for each type of mention.
We developed two machine-learning models using logistic regression and random forest and created the final model bybuilding an ensemble model on top of these models in order
to boost the performance.

Features for Entity Mentions.

The primary features used to detect types of entity mentions are the corresponding entity classes retrieved from DBpedia and Freebase (e.g., FictionalCharacter, SportsTeam).
3

http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/CRF-NER.shtml

Namestrong link match
strong typed mention match
mention ceaf

Precision
0.786
0.656
0.857

Recall
0.656
0.630
0.823

F1
0.715
0.642
0.840

Table 1: Summary of experimental results
We also use our 300 dimensional entity-embeddings constructed from Wikipedia and the predicted entity types of
the Stanford NER.

Features for NIL Mentions.

In order to detect the types of NIL mentions, we use features extracted from word embeddings. Here, the GloVe
Twitter 2B model [4] is used as the word embeddings. Wealso use the predicted types of the Stanford NER and thepart-of-speech tags.

3.

EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

In our experiments, we used the #Microposts 2015 dataset[6] split into a training set and a test set. These sets contained 3,498 and 500 tweets respectively.
Table 1 shows a summary of our experimental results. We
evaluated our system using the following three measures:strong link match to evaluate the performance of linking entities, strong typed mention match to measure the performance of mention detection and entity typing, and mention ceaf for calculating the performance of clustering detected mentions into entity mentions or NIL mentions.4 We
successfully achieved accurate performance in all of the measures.

4.

CONCLUSIONSIn this paper, we described our approach for detecting,classifying, and linking entity mentions in tweets. We introduced a novel machine-learning approach specifically targeted at tweets and successfully achieved enhanced performance on the #Microposts2015 dataset.

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4For further details of these measures, please refer to https://github.com/wikilinks/neleval/wiki/Evaluation· #Microposts2015 · 5th Workshop on Making Sense of Microposts · @WWW2015

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